When my last cheque came last January, and all my leads were silent or in a holding pattern, I took a bet on some contract work for a little company about an hour away. Over the last 8 months, I’ve learnt a lot, both about myself, the direction I want this company to go, and on the applicability and value of what it is that I do.
Part 1: New discipline, new landscape, new players
I was hired as a part of a team that does a specific task with respect to staging products and materials at different nodes in a supply chain. I learnt very quickly that the world I had come from had a lead time of c (yes, the same c as in E=Mc2: light speed).
The world of trucks, trains, ships, and more trucks was a world completely foreign to me. Goods issued, goods receipt, material lead times… all these were considerations I didn’t have any need for in energy efficiency.
And the acronyms! Holy what. My first day, I was bewildered by the ability of people to say a sentence peppered with so many acronyms (many of them sounding the same!) that the sentence barely sounded like English.
But within 2 months, I caught on. And began to flourish. Pretty soon, I was able to conceptualise things that a few weeks earlier, I didn’t even know that I didn’t know about. This really built my confidence in learning new things. I always knew I was good at it, but I didn’t realise to what degree.
Also, within this new discipline, I was navigating a totally new culture and territory. For those who already know me, they will understand that I’m not a sporty, Nike-like guy. I’m not really into sports, I don’t wear sneakers, and I’m much more comfortable at a tailor shop than at a Big 5. But what I learnt really quickly is that Nike isn’t necessarily that one dimensional. My dapper, tie-wearing self was no threat to anyone, and I was accepted simply based on my merits. Other than that, I joined a really smart, nerdy, math-based group, so found that I fit in pretty well. The overarching culture of Nike is really more about commitments to excellence than it is to product or marketing. And I really fit in to a culture that is more concerned about excelling than what you’re wearing. I really appreciated the commitment to continuous improvement as well: my ideas about making the systems better, more fluid, and more automated (covered here) were constantly shot down at other jobs. Here, they were not only welcomed, but we implemented them in sometimes as short of time frame as 2 weeks.
New colleagues
Interworks. Slalom. And the variety of people I met at Nike means I have a new pool of people and industries to draw from for both inspiration as well as employment, either via partnership or subcontracting.
I’ve learnt that I can hit the ground running with short-term contracts and really provide immediate value to clients. This is something I wasn’t sure of coming from the utility industry because they really haven’t embraced Big Data and agile frameworks for doing business in the same way. I’m still passionate about the field of energy efficiency and the big-picture implications of that industry (and the massive change we’ll see in the next 10 years). But I’m almost always 20 years ahead of my time, and I no longer feel I have to wait for them to catch up!
I now see a bigger constellation of clients, industries, and disciplines that I could help and meet and consult for. And again, my main metric is: am I leaving this place better than when I got here? I always want to answer yes to that question.